Business

With 11 days to go, the First (Pro) Novel Survey is up to more than 200 responses, which is wonderful! But it’s also generated some interesting feedback in comments and e-mails. Some people are upset that small press, self-published, and e-book authors can’t participate. Others say advances are part of a dying publishing model. There’s been worry that advances can actually harm an author who doesn’t earn out. To top things off, I’m told I’m completely out of touch with the current state of publishing.

Let’s start with the basics. An advance is an advance against your royalties. When I sold Goblin Quest to DAW, they paid me $4000, half on signing and half on publication. (Slightly lower than the average, because Goblin Quest was a reprint of a small press title.) For the sake of easy math, let’s say I got 50 cents in royalties for every copy that sold. So for the first 8000 books, I got nothing — I had already received that money up front. But once we sold book 8001, I officially earned out the advance and began receiving royalties.

Even if I never sold those 8000 copies, I keep the advance. Nor would I be blacklisted for failing to earn out. A lot of books never earn out their advance. Understand that the publisher doesn’t necessarily lose money on those books. The math is a little messy, but publishers can and do still make a profit on books that don’t earn out.

Will publishers get a little cranky if they pay you a six-figure advance and you only sell 10,000 books? Well, sure. It might mean smaller advances in the future. You might need to adopt a pseudonym (as many others have done), or change to a different publisher. But it doesn’t mean the end of your career.

Remember the advance represents an investment on the part of the publisher, and I want my publisher as invested as possible in my book. There are never any guarantees, but which do you think will get more of a sales push, the book where they paid the author $5000 up front, or the one where they paid $50,000?

Finally, there’s the fact that royalties take a long time to show up. Let’s assume your book is going to earn out, which means you’re eventually going to get the same amount of money either way. Would you rather get that money today, or wait and get it in a year or two or more?

Writing is not a hobby to me. It’s a career, one that helps me pay the mortgage and feed my family. My advances mean I know I’m going to receive a certain minimum amount on each book. I can start to plan and budget, meaning I’m better able to make a living with this. (Now if only my publisher would offer a health plan for its authors…)

As for the frustration and anger that I’m shutting out small-press and self-published authors with this survey? Yes. Yes I am. I’ve got nothing against small press and self publishing. (Please see above, where I first sold Goblin Quest to a small press.) But that’s not what I was interested in for this survey. I wanted to learn more about how authors break in with bigger, advance-paying publishers. If you have a problem with that … well, it’s your problem. Deal with it.

We talk a lot about how to sell that first novel to a major publisher, but it’s hard sometimes to draw any real conclusions on the best way to break in when all we’ve got is a lot of anecdotal data. Everyone’s path is different. The experience of someone who broke in twenty years ago might not match the realities of publishing today. For that matter, the experience of someone who broke in today might not match the realities of someone else who broke in today.

So, taking a page from Tobias Buckell and his first novel advance survey, I’ve put together a survey about selling that first novel. I would love it if anyone who has sold at least one novel (any genre, including tie-ins — there’s a question where you can enter genre) to a professional publisher (for at least a $2000 advance[1. The minimum $2000 advance is an arbitrary cutoff point, which I took from SFWA’s guidelines for professional publishers.]) could take a few minutes to click the survey link and answer about a dozen questions. If you don’t have exact numbers, please give your best estimate.

The survey will remain open through March 15. Pass it on. The more data I can pull together, the more useful the results will be. Please send people to this post instead of directly to the survey, so they get the introductory info.

I’ll post the results next month after the survey closes. This is rough, Mythbusters-style science — it’s not going to be a truly random sample, and it’s not a controlled experimental design, but it should give us some results. And it’s far better than “Well, this one guy who wrote a book once told me this is the way to sell your novel…”

If any of the survey questions are unclear, or if the survey itself gives people any trouble, please let me know ASAP so I can get that fixed.

ETA 1: For purposes of this survey, I’m not counting coauthored novels. I’m looking for the first professional novel sale where you were the sole author.

ETA 2: I do ask for book titles for verification and deduplication, if necessary. This and any other identifying information will be stripped out before anything is made public.

ETA 3: I’m looking for brand new authors and grizzled veterans alike. The broader the range of data, the more likely we’ll be able to see if certain trends have changed over time.

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Neither Amazon nor Macmillan has weighed in on this yet, as far as I can find. But we’re pretty sure Amazon pulled the books. Unless Macmillan pulled them. But it was probably Amazon. We think. At least according to that single unnamed source in the NY Times blog….

The timing does seem highly suspicious. It happened on a Friday, when companies would be slow to react, and right after the Apple iPad news (which also impacts the e-book wars). And regardless of what happened, this sucks for a lot of writers, including many of my friends at Tor.

But despite all of the angry speculation, I don’t know what happened. Once I have a little more information, I’ll happily join in the condemnations. If Amazon pulled the books, then shame on them. If Macmillan did it, then … well, WTF, Macmillan? If it was a database glitch[1. Unlikely, I admit, but I work with major database applications in my day job, and I’ve seen some weird glitches.], a lot will depend on how fast Amazon fixes it and how quickly they apologize.

For now, I’m just going to say this looks bad, and I expect to see more info very soon.

“This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon.”

The article flaunts various numbers to show that book sales are PLUMMETTING, and everything is AWFUL! (He also includes strategies for dealing with these awful truths. Coincidentally, Cooke runs Cooke Pictures, a media/publicity consulting company who will happily help you survive this terrible storm … for a fee.)

(ETA: Phil Cooke commented to say that he does not, in fact, charge a fee for his services. And then follows up with a sockpuppet. Sigh…)

For example, “Bowker reports that 560,626 new books were published in the U.S. in 2008, which is more than double the number of new books published five years earlier (2003) in the U.S. These figures include print-on-demand and short-run books, which is where most of the growth has occurred.” (Emphasis added.)

And then, from point number three, “Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we have MathFail. Let me break it down with simple and totally made-up numbers.

Let’s say a decade ago, 1000 different books were published, and each book sold an average of 10,000 copies. 1000 x 10,000 means 10,000,000 books sold overall.

Then print-on-demand technology leads to an explosion of self-publishing and vanity presses. Ten years later, we have twice as many books being published. But the average PoD title sells what, 100 copies? Let’s be generous and call it 200. Assuming no change at all in traditionally published[1. I hate that phrase, but can’t think of a better one right now] books, we see:

Oh noes! Average book sales have been cut almost in half! It’s the end of publishing … even though, in our made-up example, traditionally published books are selling just as well as they did a decade ago.

If you want to educate me, show me useful data. Be specific. Don’t just flash around misleading and utterly useless generalizations.

Want another example? “A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.”

MathFail Redux. If you sell a book to Tor or Baen or DAW, you have an extremely good chance of having your book stocked in an average bookstore. “Sell” to Publish America, and your chances are closer to 0%. But lump everything together, and you can get your average to be nice, scary, and utterly meaningless.

“Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies.” And how many of those titles are out of print? Specialty books? Vanity Press?

It’s true that publishing is in a rough place right now. Print runs really are down, overall … but not necessarily to the extent implied in Cooke’s article. Things are changing, and we’re working to keep up and adapt. It’s not the end of print, the end of publishing, or the end of the world.

This is the third year I’ve posted about the income I make as a fantasy author. (See the Money Posts from Year 1 and Year 2.) Money tends to be a taboo topic, but given all of the myths and illusions about writing, I think it’s important to get some actual data out there. Because knowing is half the battle!

The background: I’ve been writing and submitting my work since 1995. Goblin Quest was my first book with a major publisher, and came out in the end of 2006. 2009 saw the publication of my 4th and 5th novels with DAW. So while I have five books in print, I’m still an early-career author.

I am not a full-time writer, for reasons which will soon become apparent. I also write only fiction, unlike a number of authors I know who write both fiction and non-fiction (in part because the latter usually pays better).

Thanks to a last-minute D&A (delivery and acceptance) check from DAW, my writing income for 2009 came to $28,940.

I’m rounding, so the totals don’t match exactly. The most important thing I take from these numbers is how much I love my agent, who is responsible for those foreign sales. Most of that money comes from Germany, where the goblin books continue to earn nice royalties. Any time I hear a writer saying s/he doesn’t need an agent, I think back to those foreign sales. My agent almost quadrupled my writing income this year. He’s more than earned his commission.

Expenses from 2009 were between $1500 and $2000. The biggest costs were from convention attendance and postage.

I also decided to put together a graph showing my income over the past eight years (as far back as I have spreadsheets for):

Things didn’t really start to build until 2006 when the first book came out. But what’s most fascinating to me is that bump in 2008. 2008 was the first year my writing income exceeded the income from my day job. This was mostly the result of some very nice deals in Germany, including the release of the goblin books, my short fiction collection, audio books … basically, Germany + Goblins = Love.

This wasn’t something I expected to repeat in 2009 (not that I would have complained, mind you). Fiction income isn’t the most steady or stable in the world. 2008 was great. 2009 wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong. However, there’s no getting around the fact that I saw a $25K drop in income.

These things happen. My French publisher dropped me, and Germany hasn’t been as excited about the princess books. This is why I keep the day job. (If it was just me, with no family and no medical conditions that require insurance, I might think about going full-time. But that’s another post.)

I hope this is helpful. Questions, observations, and random comments are all welcome. And if previous years are any example, we should see a handful of other writers posting similar info and giving a few more data points.

I’ve written and read a fair amount about authorial promotion, what is and isn’t effective. Anyone who’s tired of book sales talk can feel free to skip this one, but I figured some of you might appreciate a little raw data to go with the conversation.

This is a graph of the sales for The Stepsister Scheme (purple line) and The Mermaid’s Madness (black line). Stepsister has been selling for just over a year now, and Mermaid has been out for about three months.

The sales data comes from Bookscan, which isn’t exact, but it’s the best measure I’ve got for week-to-week sales. All five of my books have followed the same pattern, starting with that nice big spike in the beginning. After the first three months or so, many of the books are stripped and returned to make room for new releases, and we head into the long plateau.

With all of the signings, conventions, and other events I’ve done, only two factors have ever caused a visible spike in sales. The first is Christmas. Having a book on the shelves in December is a good thing! (Thank you to everyone who bought books for presents!)

The second is the release of the next book in the series. You can see where sales of Stepsister more than doubled when Mermaid came out. I saw that same bump with the goblin series as each new book was published.

I didn’t include the goblin data here, because that would have gotten too messy. But I’ll note that the release of the two princess books did not cause a similar spike in sales of the goblin books.

Does this mean all of those other efforts are ineffective in terms of sales? Not necessarily. For one thing, Bookscan isn’t as good at capturing data from independent book dealers and such, which means there’s a good chance all of those dealer sales from conventions aren’t showing up. And while any individual event or effort doesn’t show up on the graph, they could still be having a cumulative effect over time. There’s really no way of doing a controlled study to prove it one way or the other.

And that’s it for 2009. Happy 2010, all! No resolutions here, but I am setting a goal to finish rewriting the outline (version 3.0) for Snow Queen by the end of the day, and to finish this @!#$^ first draft by the end of January. Wish me luck!

• I’ve got a book signing 12/17 at 7:00 at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor. Just in case any of you A2 folks need Christmas gift ideas 🙂 The last time I did an Ann Arbor signing, we got one of the nastiest blizzards I can remember. I’m hoping this doesn’t become a pattern.

• Dragovianknightmade this wonderful Christmas LJ icon from the cover of Mermaid. I love it!

• For those of you who read electronically, Fictionwise is running a pretty nice sale. Looks like 40% off of short fiction, and 50% rebates on e-books. (Including my own stuff.)

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Came across a post responding to the pay rate discussion and protesting how the snobby pros are pulling up the ladder, trying to keep new writers out. I know a fair number of successful authors these days, and the idea that pro writers are scared of the newbies and spending all this time and energy working to exclude them … is kind of dumb.

Of all the things I worry about, of all the things that can hurt my career, new writers don’t even make the footnotes. Many pro authors go out of their way to try to help new writers, and to repay the help we received. Most either celebrate the success of the new folks, or else simply don’t have the time or the interest to notice them. But nobody’s trying to keep the newbies down (no matter how much Publish America and their ilk try to convince you otherwise while they take your money).

How can I put this delicately? The biggest reason it’s so hard for new writers to break in is because most of us suck when we’re new. Myself included. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of utter crap while learning how to do this. Sure, I was discouraged by all the rejection. I felt shut out. I had my days where I felt like a martyr and a victim.

But believe me, it had nothing to do with pros being scared of me as a newbie, or conspiring to keep the good markets all to themselves. It had nothing to do with editors only buying work from Big Names. It had to do with the fact that my work wasn’t good enough yet.[1. Ann Leckie wrote a very good post deconstructing the “write better” advice, including some of the assumptions and flaws with that advice. Worth reading. http://ann-leckie.livejournal.com/141905.html]

If you disagree with what folks are saying, that’s one thing. Sometimes the pros are wrong. Do your research and make your own decisions. But if you’re going to argue, please try to come up with something better than The Grand Conspiracy Against New Writers?

Looking at my own bibliography, there are two stories I received no payment for, and at least a half-dozen more that fall into the semi-pro category, whether that’s a $5 flat rate or a penny a word. A careful reading will also show that this stopped around the end of 2003, after I “sold” a flash piece to a royalties-only e-book that, as far as I can tell, never sold a single copy.

Around 2004, I began submitting only to markets that paid SFWA pro rates (Then three cents a word. ETA: Current SFWA pro rate is 5 cents/word). Not because I was insulted by lesser pay rates. Not because I felt exploited by the smaller markets. But because my goal as a writer was to be read.

Publishing in those smaller venues was good for my ego. Of course it feels better to be accepted than rejected. But aside from that ego boost, those sales did little else for my stories or my career. Sure, I could go out and buy a slice of pizza with my earnings. But almost nobody read my work.

The contributors got their copy, so it’s possible some of my fellow authors glanced at my story. Maybe. (Authors, how many of you read every story in every contributor copy of an anthology or magazine?) Aside from that? Well, one friend in college did pick up a copy of World Wide Writer, so that’s something, right? What’s World Wide Writer, you ask? Oh, right. They were a tiny startup ‘zine that died after two issues.

I don’t use pay rate as an absolute rule. Sure I’d rather make $250 than $25. But I sold a story to Andromeda Spaceways recently, and they pay significantly less than 5 cents/word. On the other hand, they’ve been around a long time, put out a nice magazine, and have a good reputation and readership for a semi-pro. There are a handful of others, publications that pay less than pro rates, but have earned a lot of critical acclaim or developed a broader readership.

In general though, minuscule pay rate correlates to minuscule readership. I suspect there are more markets listed on the for-the-luv page at Ralan than there are readers for those markets.

When I started aiming for pro markets in 2004, several things happened. I got rejected more. I was forced to improve as a writer. And eventually, as I broke into those markets, more people began reading my work.

Is Black Matrix exploiting writers? Token payment is better than nothing. (Chtulhu spare us from markets promising “exposure” as compensation.) But there’s “token” and there’s “spare change I found in my sofa.”[1. Deleted for unnecessary snark.] I don’t believe Black Matrix is trying to scam anyone. But I won’t submit to them, and I wouldn’t recommend them as a market for new writers who want to build a career and be read.

• Thank you to everyone who’s offered new and autographed books for the DV Book Drive. I’ll be continuing to collect books through about mid-December, at which point they will be delivered to the shelter.

• I’m still taking entries into the Mock Cover Contest, too. I’ll pick the top entries and put those up for a vote early next week.

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Way back when, after I sold Goldfish Dreams to a small publisher, I started hunting for blurbs. I was fortunate to get some great ones, but I remember the individual who e-mailed to say he hadn’t read the entire book, but offered a blurb anyway. Better still, when I pointed out that his blurb contained spoilers, he invited me to just rewrite it however I saw fit.

I’d like to say I took the ethical path and declined. Alas, I was young and desperate. I rewrote the blurb, e-mailed it to him for approval, and slapped his name on it. I rationalize it by saying at least he approved the blurb, but it’s not my proudest moment as an author.

Years later, I was reading Julie Czerneda‘s comments about blurbs. I can’t remember exactly how she said it, but I came away thinking of blurbs as a contract, a matter of trust between reader and author. If a blurb from me has any impact at all, it will be because you’ve read my work, and you trust me as an author. You trust that I wouldn’t recommend something I didn’t like.

Over the past few years, I’ve begun getting more blurb requests, which means I’ve had to decide how I’m going to approach this. I find myself thinking about that blurb I got for Goldfish Dreams, and the one I got from Julie for Goblin Quest[Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy]. Guess which one means more to me? Guess which of these two individuals I want to be like.

That’s led to some uncomfortable moments. I’ve had to tell several friends that I couldn’t blurb their books for one reason or another. Sometimes the book just didn’t work for me. That makes for an awkward conversation, but I also try to be honest.

It’s not a bad book. I like the idea of using elemental magic in urban fantasy. Gin has the strong female thing going, which I generally enjoy. And the story is definitely a page-turner.

I still declined to blurb it, and a part of me continues to wonder if I’m overthinking it. Spider’s Bite, like a fair amount of urban fantasy, is a pretty “adult” book. There’s violence and bloodshed, as well as fairly graphic sexual content. It’s a very different style than my own work, and that’s where I hesitated.

If my name were to show up on the cover, what would that signal to my readers? What expectations does that create? Will someone pick up this book expecting light, fun fantasy like Jim Hines writes?

I’m sure there’s overlap between Estep’s readers and my own. People read a wide range. And It’s not like my blurb is going to scar some innocent, wide-eyed young reader for life by tricking them into reading sex and violence.

But I wasn’t comfortable with it, and I’m continuing to try to understand where that’s coming from. On that note, I would love to hear your thoughts on blurbs. What is and isn’t appropriate, what works and what doesn’t, and so on. As an author, where would you draw the line? As a reader, what makes you lose trust with a blurbing author?

Like I did last week, I’m rerunning this piece from 2006 (with minor edits) to get it into WordPress.

For a long time, invitation-only anthologies were my Holy Grail, a goal only one step below actually selling a novel to a major publisher. I drove myself a little loopy trying to crack the invite market, and thought I’d share those experiences for anyone trying to do the same. More